How to convert accented letters to regular char in Java

Question

How do I convert Æ and á into a regular English char with Java ? What I have is something like this : Local TV from Paraná. How to convert it to [Parana] ?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there's no way to do this automatically -- you'd have to substitute manually using String.replaceAll.

String str = "Paraná";
str = str.replaceAll("á", "a");
str = str.replaceAll("Æ", "a");

Answer 2

Look at icu4j or the JDK 1.6 Normalizer:

public String removeAccents(String text) {
    return NNormalizer.normalize(text, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
                     .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");
}